


What the Sibyl Saw

by completeclarity



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 02:42:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4002790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/completeclarity/pseuds/completeclarity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sina is twenty-five years and a week old and her best friend is two weeks and six feet into the ground because she killed herself, and Sina feels like she's right there with Olivia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What the Sibyl Saw

Sing, muses, the rage of the one left behind.  


Her misery, immeasurable and ruinous.

  


The birthday card sits almost finished on the kitchen table. In purple lettering on a baby blue background, the front reads: "It's been said of you, 'To know her is to love her.'" Flip to the inside, it reads: "Happy birthday, slut!"  


Underneath, in Olivia's thin scrawl, always leaning to the right like as if italicized, _"Jokes. Not really. But in all seriousness, happy birthday, As one of your favourite old dead Greeks once said, 'Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.' So, my beloved soul sister: to another twenty-five years! Opa!"_

It is left unsigned, but it is distinctly Olivia. Adam plucks the card from the table and hands it to Sina.

"Here. I know it's a little late, but she would have wanted you to have this."

His hands shake as he stretches it out towards her. Sina doesn't take the card. My grief is greater than yours, she thinks, I had her longer than you.

"Can you just ̶ "

He shakes the card at her. Sina takes it. His offering means nothing to her, the sentiment falls short. Sina is twenty-five years and a week old and her best friend is two weeks and six feet into the ground because she killed herself, and Sina feels like she's right there with Olivia. The last thing she wants to do is to commiserate with Adam, the Boyfriend of Olivia. Especially when he's looking at her like she looks like shit. Unwashed black hair. Pimples on her forehead like the signs of a pox. Red nebulae around her irises. Good. She looks how she feels inside: diseased, in agony, the walking dead.

Suffer more. Instead, the Boyfriend walks back into the living room to retrieve the box of stuff Olivia left for her. He looks like grief settles well with him. Grief made his spine stronger, his blue eyes brighter, his body taller. Maybe Sina is shrinking, like the little old ladies with their purses hanging off their walkers, the weight of their years crushing them down until they're buried beside their husbands, lovers, best friends who had left them behind.

He comes back with the box, a plastic thing with a white lid, big enough for a couple of books, a sweater or two, some photos, all the marks of Sina in Olivia and the Boyfriend's perfect apartment.

"There's more stuff, but I haven't finished sorting everything yet. Liv ̶," he coughs, "her mom is coming over tomorrow. If you want to come back and help and stuff." He trails off. Hopeful. Grieve with me, he seems to say with his eyes. Blue eyes like Olivia. They would've had blue eyed babies. Their babies would've had Olivia's brown hair because the Boyfriend is a dirty blond, and brown trumps blond on a Punnett square if she's remembering high school biology correctly. If he had stayed long enough. If she had lived a little longer. Oh god, why did you have to go?

"Did you see it coming?"

The Boyfriend's perfect jaw clenches, the cleft chin jerks as the stiff line of his mouth grows thinner.

"No, I...no."

Sina jerks the box out of his hands. "See you soon."

She storms out of the apartment, her own funeral procession, an _ekphora_ of one.

  


Funeral rites to certain cultures were not only important, but incredibly necessary to prevent the dead from coming back. The projector shows a picture of funerary steles. Women prepare the body. The coins for Charon. The _ekphora_ marching to carry the body to its rest. Where were the libations and prayers for Olivia? The funeral was rushed and perfunctory. The Parents and the Boyfriend sending Olivia down to the underworld as quickly as possible, the shame of her death buried with her in the seventh circle where she'll become a thorny bleeding tree, eternally inflicting violence against herself.

 _You're prickly, Sina,_ Olivia had said when they first met, _the kind of cat that you just can't pick up._ A smile and a laugh. _You're a serious Debbie Downer. Lighten the fuck up!_

"I don't know how without you." Sina pours the Fireball onto the newly planted grass on Olivia's grave and then tosses a handful of gold foil chocolate coins on top. "Here's to you! Here's to me. Here's to us! Twenty-five. Quarter of a century!"

 _A party for your twenty-first, Sina!_ She had said, _let's celebrate being immortal._  


"I can't."

_See, that's the funny thing about 'we'. It's a first person plural. I'm the first person and you're my plural._

"You have Adam."

 _Don't be stupid! We've been friends since middle school. Hoes before bros. Sisters before misters._ A wink. _Chicks before dicks._

"You're right," Sina slurs and pours another three shots worth of the cinnamon libation onto the grass, soaking down to the eco-friendly bamboo coffin that the Boyfriend picked out. The thing is Olivia probably would've picked the same thing for herself.

 _You know me,_ a quirk of the lips, one dimple on her cheek, the same side as the beauty mark right below her eye. I really don't, Sina thinks.

"I loved you. Why did you kill yourself?"

Hitting the headstone with her bottle wasn't the best idea. The glass shatters against the stone, scratching across "Beloved daughter, loved by all." These words will last forever in this measured allegro through time, a version of Olivia entombed in granite that bears no resemblance to her at all. Did these people who planted this, who sandblasted the letters, who handed over the inscription, did they know Olivia at all?

The Olivia Sina knew ̶ the one who hated her thumbs because they looked like toes, the one who confessed that she didn't pee in the Boyfriend's apartment for a month because she was too embarrassed and held it on the long subway ride home, the one who accidentally ripped Sina's favourite copy of the Iliad while playing keep away, that Olivia hated her Parents. Hated them _so much! Look at my neck! He slapped me and grabbed me and shook me until I couldn't breathe! Mom didn't do anything! I'm moving in with Adam. Fuck them!_

Beloved daughter. Scratch out the lies. Jam more chocolate coins into the spaces. Make sure Olivia's not waiting on the shores for the boat while others go before her. She hated waiting in lines. Sina never gets to the prayer because that's when the police arrests her for public intoxication and vandalism.

  


The drunk tank is just an ordinary room, not a keg shaped capsule like Sina always imagines. There's a stack of chairs in one corner, a long black table in the other. Bisecting the room is a long white line. Sina walks the line three times before the officers allow her one call. Olivia's number is automatic at this point, the only one she knows by heart because who remembers phone numbers in the age of cellphones? By the second ring, Sina remembers that Olivia's dead, but there are no takebacks with the police. No "Jokes. Not really." But someone picks up.

"Hello? Who- what?"

"Adam?"

"This phone is- Olivia?" Surprise and anguish colour the voice. The Boyfriend. Adam.

"Um...no," Sina clears her throat. The alcohol rasp in her voice could be mistaken for Olivia's throaty voice in the transition of sound waves to electrons and back. "It's Sina. I called the wrong ̶ "

"Oh. Sina. I thought ̶ "

"Yeah. No. I wasn't thinking ̶ "

"I thought, I hoped ̶ "

"I'm sorry."

It's the first time she says that to him. The first time she says those words out loud. She wishes she could take it back, not that she doesn't mean it, but those specific words in that order mean as much as they do out of order. Some people believe that repetition emphasizes a point, makes it stronger. Like looping it over and over will make it more concrete, the truth. Here's something Sina has been looping over and over: Olivia was happy. Olivia took a full bottle of anti-depressants. Olivia is dead. Sina didn't see it coming. No matter how many times she plays it, it doesn't make it more believable. Olivia was not depressed. Sina would have seen it. She would have seen the signs. So yeah, Sina believes "I'm sorry" means as much as describing something as "interesting", a placeholder for what you really mean. _Swift-footed Achilles sighed deeply: my dear friend is gone, he whom I honoured more than all, honoured as my own self._

"What's...what's wrong?"

"I'm in jail. Could you come bail me out?"

"Jail?" Disbelief. Sina, the boring friend. Sina, the Greek major freak. Sina, the jailbird.

"I'm in the drunk tank. Could you please get me out?"

It's humiliating begging the Boyfriend to fetch her ̶ _Adam doesn't mind if you come with us! We'll pick you up. Look for a silver Focus_ ̶ Sina shakes her head. Walks the stripe on the floor with her eyes. Focus. Don't throw up.

"Could you?"

"Yeah. I'm coming right now. Don't worry. I'll get you out."

A click. The police officer walks back in and takes the phone away before she could think about strangling herself with the cord ̶ _Don't be melodramatic. Adam's cool. I really like him, so could you please be nice to him? Please, my favourite prickly cat?_

"I'll try. For you," slips out before Sina realizes that there's no one in here with her. She's alone in the drunk tank with a ghost. 

  


A memory comes to Sina while waiting in the blindingly white room. Olivia sat on the couch with a mug in her hands. Adam was at the kitchen table with his laptop. She was in an armchair with a book, Plutarch's _Parallel Lives_. They sat in the proportions of a scalene triangle: Olivia close to Sina, but closer to Adam, and Adam and Sina keeping far from each other. This was the last time she saw Olivia alive.

They took turns looking up at Olivia, alternating with the precision of dressage or a waltz. When the clicking of the keys stopped, that meant Adam was sneaking a peek. Right after the swish of a page turning, that was when Sina would take her turn. Olivia, oblivious to everything, sat placidly in the couch, staring blankly at the direction of her bedroom.

 _"Don't you love mornings?"_ She had said, _"The possibilities for today are endless."_

Adam had laughed, _"You're cheerful today."_

 _"What the hell does that mean?"_ Olivia had snapped, temper flaring. Had she always been so mercurial?

_"N-nothing. I didn't mean anything by that."_

_"Christ, Adam! Why are you always on my back about everything?"_

Sina always hated when adults shouted. Even as an adult, the sound of a pair of raised voices, a male and female, would always bring to mind her own parents.

_"Liv. I just made an innocuous comment."_

She had scoffed, _"Innocuous. Why can't you talk like a normal person? Innocuous. Mythomania. Pyrrhic. All these ten dollar words. Who are you trying to impress?"_

_"No one! Liv! What is up with you?"_

_"Nothing!"_ She had shouted. Olivia had raised her hands above her head as if to grab her hair, as if to reach up for some spiritual guidance. Then she turned her divine wrath to Sina, _"Why aren't you saying anything? Why do you always just sit there and not do anything?"_

Then Adam had walked between Sina and Olivia, shielded Sina from Olivia's wild rage. _"Don't yell at her! She doesn't have anything to do with it!"_

_"Why are you defending her? Why don't you help me?"_

Innocuous. All of it was innocuous, but as Sina's head melts from the alcohol and the memory plays without her conscious effort, it seems like that was a cry for help. In reality, the fight kept going for another fifteen minutes. Sina left as soon as she could. Adam called later to apologize. Olivia never apologizes. In her head, Sina rewrites the story. What the hell? She's drunk, her best friend's dead, she's in jail. She can do whatever the hell she wants.

In her head, she would not be the one who leaves, but Adam. As the apartment door slams behind him, Sina would sit Olivia down in the couch. She would slide an arm around Olivia, casual the way her physical interactions with Olivia never were, and Olivia would lean into her body the way Olivia never once did with Sina, but Sina often observed her doing with Adam. In this memory, Sina would tell Olivia a story that Olivia often asked about ̶ _You never tell me anything about your family. I tell you about the Parents, so tell me about yours_ ̶ but Sina never dared to divulge. But this time, she would.

She would tell Olivia about a girl, eight years of age, sitting under the table reading. Her mother still in bed. Her father screaming at her mother to wake up. She would tell Olivia about the white pills in the pillboxes, one for each day, about carefully watching for the signs: the not-eating, the oversleeping, the lack of smiling. Innocuous. All of it innocuous.

In her head, Olivia would then ask, _"What does it all mean?"_

"What madness the Sibyl saw," Sina explains with her lips pressed to the white walls of the drunk tank, "in the blood of the women." 

Adam shows up a little after 2 am. His button down unbuttoned to the top of his sternum, a peek of a white wifebeater and some blonde hairs. Sina feels a thrill in messing him up a little. 

"Why did you do that?" He asks when he sees her curled up in a corner. No use in playing dumb.

"I'm grieving."

He nods, those strong shoulders sagging, Sisyphus pushing the boulder, "I know. But this isn't healthy. You won't talk to me. You won't talk to Nancy." The Mother. Why would she talk to the enemy?

"Can you take me home?"

"We're going back to my place. You need to sober up and we need to talk about what you did tonight."

"Fine with me," Sina mutters, surly. She walks out. Adam follows behind her. A motion at the corner of her eyes, Adam's arm reaching towards the small of her back ̶ Olivia tossing her hair as the Boyfriend guides her around the other party-goers. Olivia burying her laugh in the side of the Boyfriend's neck as he wraps his arms around her waist. Olivia, face down on the bed, hand around an orange bottle as the Boyfriend tugs the sheet down her spine to cover the rest of her body ̶ The hand hovers uncertainly, the line of her back a flesh Rubicon. Cross or not, she still feels the warmth. It feels like a betrayal. _To whom?_

  


"I want to you know," Adam paces the living room, "that I'm not angry with you."

"Okay." Okay, dad.  


"And I will take care of the repairs. Nancy doesn't need to know what happened tonight. Okay?"

"Okay." Thanks for not ratting me out, dad.

He stops by the armchair she's sitting in and leans down, "Are you still drunk? Do you want some coffee or water? Advil?"

"No." Yes, she is still spinning and the room is melting around his body. It's not a bad feeling, being out of control. In this state, Sina revels in being contrary. If Adam wants to pretend to be the strong and stoic boyfriend, Sina will just have to play the manic, grieving, out of control jilted best friend.

"Okay. Do you want to talk?"

"No."

"Well, you're going to have to give me some explanation for what happened."

"No."

"Don't be like that, Sina. I know we're still grieving, but-"

"Really?" Sina leaps out of her chair and nearly tips head forward into the couch. He's moved stuff around in the living room. What was wrong with the way it was before? Adam catches her, but Sina shoves his arms around. She flails around for a few seconds, feeling cartoonish. She gets her limbs under control, pushes her hair out of her face, and straightens her clothes.

"Did you see it coming?"

Adam sighs, "No, for the last time, no."

"Why didn't you see it? You lived with her."

"And you're her best friend," Adam bites out, "Why didn't you see it?"

She asks herself that all the time. Why didn't she see it coming? She knows the signs, the omens that the gods gave to the prophetesses in the temples. The Sibyl saw everything, that was her gift from Apollo, so why didn't she see this coming?

"Don't you think I ask myself that all the time?" Adam says after a long silence. "Why didn’t I see it before she killed herself? How could I? How could you?"

See the signs. Not stop her. Leave Olivia to herself. There were so many ways of answering that question. Olivia sitting up on the bed. It's 3 pm, she just woke up. _I'm sorry. I've just been so tired._ Olivia dodging a kiss from the Boyfriend, turning her head, his lips skimming the curve of her cheek. Olivia sitting in the bathroom at the Christmas party. _Sorry, I'm just a little overwhelmed. No! I'm good! Just give me five. Go before they think we're making out in the bathroom._ A wink. Jokes. Not really to Sina. 

  


Three hours after she's tucked into the bed in the spare bedroom, Adam sleeping on the couch, Sina wakes up in the middle of the night with a ghost. This makes as much sense to her sleep-addled, hungover mind as anything else that happened today. After all, Olivia has never followed the rules and the dead find too many ways to linger.

Olivia's at the foot of the bed. She looks up, blue eyes dark, brown hair streaked with shiny white lines from the light of the streetlamps filtering through the crooked blinds. She looks good, familiar. In Sina's dreams, Olivia was rotting in the eco-friendly casket, an extra from a Romero film raised by _necyomantīa_ , reaching for Sina with her nails caked with dirt, digging her way back to life.

"Hey Sina. You chose a good time to start drinking."

Sina sits up, a deadly calm settles over her, "Liv?"

"Sina."

" _Olivia_."

" _Sina_. Are we going to do this all night?"

Adam is a few feet and a shout away. It's like Olivia knows what Sina's thinking because she turns in the direction of the door, towards the room where she ate a bottle of Lexapro. She lets out a breath, like she has physical lungs to exhale with, "I suppose I was waiting for you to notice that something was wrong."

Sina takes a slow breath and lets it out, mirroring Olivia. In her dreams, Olivia is never so understanding.

"How was I supposed to know?"

"I don't know," Olivia sighs, "We were like sisters. Hos before bros. I thought you would see it. See what was coming before I self-destructed, like a psychic or something. Fuck. I thought someone would see. Me. Sad."

She laughs, low and amused, like a sly courtesan.

"Me sad. You help. Me better," she pauses, "Do you think cavemen had it easier communicating? That we, with all our wordy words and texts and phones just made it harder to talk to each other?"

"We talk all the time! You never said anything!"

"I know," Olivia interrupts, "I was ashamed. I'm regretting it now that I'm," gestures at herself, but it doesn't make sense because she looks as good as the last day Sina saw her alive, "I guess we never really understood each other, no matter how close we thought we were."

That hurt her. A lot. "What do you want?"

Olivia turns away and her shoulders jerk and dance. Sina thinks she's crying before she realizes it's laughter. Olivia turns back and stares at her, eyes unnaturally black.

"What do you think?" she asks and reaches out for Sina.

As Olivia's hands close in, Sina breathes, "I didn't know what you were thinking."

  


_My favourite time of day,_ she says, _is the moment right before I awake where I have the choice to wake up or fall asleep again. I'm so warm under the covers, on top of the bed sheets, but I don't really feel them physically. I feel like I'm floating. Elaine of Astolat, on the river floating forever._ She laughs. _Does that sound stupid?_

"Yeah, it does. Wake up."

_Okay._

Sina fights to keep the alcohol and the chocolate coins from painting the blue bed sheets. _You could never hold your drinks._ A stranger in her body. A dead girl living in her head.

_Tell me one of your Greek stories. Make it a tragic one about love._

"I loved you. You never knew." Sina always thought that she'd grow out of it eventually, but it's too late. There is already a connection between the idea of Olivia and the idea of love. Olivia will control how Sina feels about people for the rest of her life, and she won't ever know it.

"Stop it! Stop it right now. This is my head. This is my body. I want you out!"

Except the dead have a tendency to linger where they shouldn't. _I fucked up. Real bad. I was just so sick of feeling the way I did. I just wanted to fix myself or have it over with. Does that make any sense?_

A limp hand dangling. A row of pills.

 _Do you know what it feels like to just want to be gone? And then realize that all you really wanted was to take everything back? I regret it. I want to fix it. I want a second chance._ A hand reaches up and touches Sina's face, stroking down the curve of her cheek. _I am here. I feel again. Maybe something was wrong with my body, something broken in the wires, but it's different now. I can_ ̶ a kiss pressed against a mouth, the right amount of saliva and pressure, a thumb in the hollow of the throat, stroking up to an Adam's apple, a finger following a lazy path down the spine ̶ _for the first time in years, I feel._ The hand on Sina's cheek keeps moving down her body. Her back arches, the Delphic Sibyl writhing as she is blessed by Apollo. 

  


There is a stirring in the depths of her body, awakened after a long sleep in ice. She wants to run, she wants to eat, oh, she wants to see Adam and kiss him and tell him she's sorry, so fucking sorry for being present, yet not at all. She slips out of the blue sheets, from the spare bedroom that is almost foreign to her, and into the master bedroom, her sanctuary and her prison. Adam isn't sleeping. He's pacing by the window, one hand clenched in his hair, the other in his wifebeater at his stomach. Oh, those hands, that face, Apollo Virotutis for the benefit of mankind.

She runs to him and grabs him by his cheeks.

"Smile for me!"

Adam flinches, "What the hell is wrong with you?"

He tries batting her hands away.

"Please, just smile. I just need you to smile for me. Please."

He does, but it's more of a grimace, more teeth than necessary and more animal than man. It is enough.

"I love you. I wanted to say I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Fuck, I can't even start to apologize for what I've done to you."

A torrent of words come flooding out and dismay splashes across his face.

"Sina, what the hell are you saying?"

She forgot for a moment. It felt so right to be in a body, any body and anybody.

"Sina. I think you're still drunk. Go back to your room."

She shakes her head, the flash of black hair out of the corner of her eyes alarming and familiar by turn.

"I'm sorry. I'm...grieving."

Adam's eyes soften. His blue eyes brighter with tears.

"Yeah. It's been...rough for all of us."

"For you especially," she ventures, "I know how much you loved her and how much she loved you. She loved you so, so much. You have to know that."

He startles, then, releasing a breath, his spine straightens. She recognizes when he's trying to compartmentalize his feelings.

"I...know. I know you loved her too."

"Yes, I did." She does now.

"I wish I knew why," Adam turns around, presses his forehead against the wall, "We were going to throw a big party for your birthday. She bought you that Troy movie with Eric Bana as a joke and then that book you wanted. She got you a card. She didn't even sign it yet! I just wish I could have seen it coming."

She reaches out with the hand of her best friend, placed the palm flat in the middle of his back, crossing the river with the army of her fingers.

"I think no matter how much we think we know each other, unless we're living in each other's head, we can never really, truly know what someone's thinking, why someone did what she...they did."

Adam shudders, a ripple down the down the line of his back, through Sina's arm, across her nerve endings, sparking up to her brain where _she_ feels it.

"What the Sibyl saw or didn't see ̶ " she starts, but the thought stops, caught in the tangled line between Sina, Olivia, and SinaandOlivia.

"What?"

"Nevermind. I'm sorry," she says and she means it. Adam turns and before he can stop her, she pulls his head down by his hair and drinks of his breath. After a moment, his arms wrap around her waist. No return now.

  


Sina wakes up and remembers a time when Olivia wasn't dead. The two of them lay on the grass, curled up against each other, back to back. Like Aristophanes' children of the earth, a soul with four arms, four legs, and two faces, split in half by Zeus, doomed to hunger for their other half. They, SinaandOlivia, were whole again before the origin of love, before the origin of loss. Then Olivia stirs in her mind and the ache starts between her legs and all she wants to do is be gone, back asleep, to drown forever. A betrayal, a knife to the back, Zeus tearing the children of the earth in two. _Apollo gave the Sibyl a wish in exchange for her virginity. Where is my boon?_

 _I'm sorry_ , she cries, _I missed him so much. I miss us so much._

 _Please_ , she begs, and the sensation of a hand stroking a cheek, across smooth skin, encircling arms. _It can be yours, ours._

_Stop it!_

Who said what, who said that? She's confusing and confused. This is a violation, but also in the best way possible. Better than she imagined, nothing like she imagined. Sina didn't love Olivia in her head anymore than Troy loved its wooden horse, but Sina loves Olivia. And Olivia wants ̶

_To be alive again._

"I can't live like this," Sina whispers to the living and the dead.

  


The soul wandered the underworld and stumbled upon a long forgotten path, leading to two doorways, one of ivory and one of horn. Once, they were used by the souls to send visions to the living ̶ men, women, children, oracles alike ̶ for the dead know time as a river and human existence as a ripple. The soul, peering through the gate of deception and the gate of fulfillment at the world of the living beyond, seeing no difference between the one or the other, chose not to care which it passed through. 

  


She wakes up when she feels movement on the other side of the bed. She cracks open one eye and Adam is halfway out of the bed, a small guilty smile gracing his face.

"Morning."

"Hey."

"It was a...a strange and rough night. You feeling okay?"

"Yeah," she says, "I feel good."


End file.
